Infinite Farmer

I don't understand what you hope to accomplish here. You are burning time. You've lost a week of your month already.

"Yeah, well, you aren't really all that trustworthy, are you?" Tulland asked back.

Tulland leaned on his shovel and looked at his work in satisfaction. After some short experimentation, he had confirmed that he could sense the distance limits of his farm, and had painstakingly traced out the circle in the open field before beginning his planting. Mostly it was just briars, grown from his normal Hades Lunger Briar stock. He had enhanced each seed as much as his skills would allow, and had planted each in a combination of its own fruit and the meat of Razored Lungers.

At the center and edges in each of the four directions, he had planted an Ironbranch seed. Tulland still couldn't do anything to manipulate these seeds, including enhancing them, but he took that as a good sign for their overall quality as far as his Broadcast skill was concerned. He did what he could for them with fertilizer and water, then left them in the soil.

And then came the hard, boring part. After hunting up enough fertilizer and planting all his seeds, Tulland spent a full two days using Enhance Plant again and again, hitting his entire farm and a handful of plants just outside it. Between uses, he would go hunt more meat to feed to his Lunger Briars, which they greedily accepted.

You will run out of time.

"Maybe, but it really doesn't matter how fast I go if I die. See, that's the trick here. I need to not die. And any time I spend not running for my life or almost bleeding out on the other side of that exit is time gained."

Still. You must be bored. Nervous.

"Sure. But guess what? That's fine. I'm almost done anyway. I just wanted you to see this next part. Because that's the part you really aren't going to like."

Tulland's farm had been growing strong, but had reached a point of diminishing returns. The individual briars were about as big as they could productively get, and the trees only grew slowly. Theoretically, he could spend as much time pouring magical power into them as he wanted, but he would only get the use of them for two days once he moved on to the next floor. That just wasn't worth it as a non-permanent buff.

Outside his farm was a slightly different story. There, he had planted briars using what meat he could from the Forest Duke, and some other materials he pulled from more digestive parts of its body. In addition to that, he had planted one more sapling. Ignoring his farm now, he sat for a few hours and dumped every bit of magical power he could make into that one smaller patch of growth.

At the end, he had a dozen Lunger Briars and one very healthy Ironwood sapling that was both thicker and heavier for its size than the last sapling had been.

He carefully harvested all of them, taking his time cutting through the sapling before refining the cut end down to a point that was, true to the name, almost as hard as iron.

That's more vines than you can carry. Do you plan on stowing them?

"No because I'm not stupid. Watch this."

Tulland's armor was trash, and there was little he could do about that. But his vines were pretty tough. The thorns made them unwieldy, but he had recently contemplated the fact that there was no law that vines had to have thorns literally everywhere. He trimmed them carefully on one side of a few of the vines with his Farmer's Tool, then wound them around his biceps. He tried it. The thorns that were left got in the way a little, but not enough that he would be seriously hampered.

Trimming in the same way, he wound one around his neck and head, leaving a bit of space around his mouth and eyes but mostly covering everywhere else. The helmet was much more restricting, but he had no illusions of truly bobbing and weaving through any expertly thrown attacks. He would deal with the feeling of wearing a neck brace if it meant a bit more survivability.

His chest was the most trimmed of the vines, since he still needed to be able to drop his arms to his sides and move them unencumbered. It took him a while to do, but in the end Tulland had the plants trimmed in such a way as to have spikes facing forwards and backwards from him, but nowhere else. And for his forearm vines, he left the spikes completely intact. Those were his attacking vines, as far as he was concerned. They would be off of him almost immediately whenever an actual combat kicked up.

Tulland's plan was to put a vine on his calves, thighs, ankles, hip, elbow, and any other body part he could fit. As Tulland started working on his legs, the Dungeon System told him it had other plans.

"Dammit." Tulland was planning on doing exactly that. He tried wrapping the vines around himself anyway, just to make sure the Dungeon System would actually enforce its own rule. It did. He simply couldn't will himself to pick up the plants when his intention was to use them in that way. "I guess I'm reshuffling some of these."

Tulland kept his chest and head armor in place, but moved his bicep armor to his shins. He figured that he would have his attacking vines up high where he needed them, his lower legs covered from little animal-type attackers, and his vital points mostly covered. And, in the event he needed to, he could get all his vines into play at once, sending them all jumping to take down one individual threat.

I need to avoid that, though. These things will burn themselves out pretty fast if I use them that way.

Agreed. Although you likely won't have a choice. The System almost reeked of disdain for this whole plan. You look ridiculous, you know.

"I know. But who's here to see?"

Tulland grabbed his bag of seeds, which wasn't exactly just that. It was seeds, some increasingly smelly meat, and some fruits he'd either use for fertilizer and food. He had tried his best to segment each type of seed and fertilizer from each other by weaving the vines into compartments, and thought he had succeeded at it. At least the stock of fruit he would rely on to eat for the first day in his new environment was far enough from the meat that he didn't think he'd get sick.

Turning off the Ouros System's communications, Tulland moved towards the exit to the floor. It was a giant arch intertwined with branches and held two large wooden doors, and it wasn't particularly hard to find now that he could look for it without much threat of death. It was somewhat near where he had first encountered the Forest Duke. Far enough that he technically could have made it out without alerting the big elk, but close enough that the chances would have been low.

As Tulland moved, he made one last experiment by winding a few vines around his new spear, but couldn't make it work. He would have to make do with what he had. He stood in front of the stone arch with a bag full of seeds and plants as juiced by his farm as he was likely to get, and still scared of what was coming. There was no telling how much the difficulty would spike without asking the Ouros System, and he couldn't be sure the bastard wouldn't just lie anyway.

I guess hesitating won't help. Tulland tried to steel himself for the plunge, and tragically failed. Whatever he had been through so far hadn't been by choice, and it hadn't come anywhere near making him a tough, brave person.

He was starting to understand more and more of what his uncle and his tutor had tried to explain to him about the realities of commanding troops. It wasn't as simple as moving chess pieces around a board, commanding them to do a thing, and then expecting them to do it. Some things were hard to face. Other things were impossible. Somewhere deep down inside himself, Tulland knew that if he didn't move forward now, he never would. He would hide until the System won the bet and stripped him of his power, then spend the rest of his life here, in an empty forest, eating barely tolerable fruits and killing tiny, vicious animals.

There was no way Tulland could ever have overcome his fear of the second floor of The Infinite, unless he was pushed by a greater fear entirely. Luckily, Tulland had just the thing. There was something he was more afraid of, and it was a combination of the scenario where the System returned to his world with enough power to hurt his friends and the idea of spending the rest of his life alone. He would do anything to avoid that.

Especially if all it took was a single step forward.

Holding his breath and screwing his eyes shut, Tulland took a big, fast step through the arch. He believed nothing had happened at all until he opened his eyes and found himself standing in thick mud, slowly sinking as the wet earth dragged him in. There were plants of different sorts all around, a treasure trove for the young battle-farmer to exploit. He hardly saw them. Something else entirely was drawing all of his attention at the moment.

In front of him, looking sharp from almost every angle, was a wolf. A moss-covered wolf, or else one that grew a sort of soft carpet of plant matter as hair. Its teeth were bright, glistening yellow, and were close enough to count. As it growled and snarled at Tulland, a system description popped up.

Tulland knew he likely couldn't run, at least without sacrificing several of his briars to hold the thing back as he did. In the split second he had to contemplate that option, the choice was ripped from him as the wolf snarled and sent itself and its deadly mouthful of teeth flying towards Tulland's neck like a bolt from a crossbow.